The Beginning of Everything(71)

I kept seeing it over and over again in my head, Cassidy’s eyes filling with tears as she announced that she wished we’d never met. The way her hair streamed behind her as she ran away from me, confident I wouldn’t follow. The stupid lie I’d shouted after her.

We’d been so good together once, and then we’d rotted, like some corpse with a delayed burial. I read somewhere that the hair and fingernails on dead bodies don’t actually grow, it just looks like they do because the skin contracts as the body dries out. So it’s possible to lie even in death, to deceive people from beyond the grave. I wondered if that’s what this was. If I was staring at the rotting corpse of what Cassidy and I had once had, wrongly convinced there was still life in it, grasping onto an uninformed lie.

I watched my friends climb into the team van that afternoon, their luggage filled with baguettes and liquor and Fruit by the Foot, and then I went home and played this useless video game with the sound off so I wouldn’t miss it if Toby called.



MY MOM MUST have felt sorry for me, because she let me sleep in on Saturday. I finally got up around noon, after having decided that, as far as monogamous relationships go, I could probably do worse than marrying my bed.

Since all of my friends were up in Santa Barbara, I wound up at the library again, halfheartedly working on college applications but mostly checking my phone like a madman.

There was no point in bothering Toby, since he’d have debate rounds all day, and I found myself wishing I’d gone to the tournament. I pictured Austin with his endless supply of entertaining YouTube videos, and Phoebe passing out contraband snack foods (“nineties nostalgia guaranteed”) and even Sam rolling up his sleeves to mix massively intoxicating cocktails. And Toby, with his thrift-store suit and stubborn insistence that we call him “O Captain My Captain.”

The girls next to me in the library had been talking loudly, so I’d resorted to headphones. Which is why, when my phone rang, I almost missed it.

“Yeah?” I said, lunging for it.

“Dude, you missed a sick party!” Toby sounded incredibly caffeinated, like someone should have pulled him away from the Red Bull two cans ago. “Ah! Faulkner! You should have come! Everyone wishes you were here. Except Luke, because last night he got so drunk that he peed the bed.”

“How much pee are we talking?” I asked, gathering my things. The girls sitting nearby gave me an odd look, which I supposed was justified.

“If his bed was the gulf, this was an oil spill.”

“You are a magnificent friend for telling me this.” I passed through the turnstile, nodding to the girl who always let me through without ID.

It was cloudy outside, not so much overcast as overcome by fog. It happened sometimes. A huge beast of a cumulous would swallow Eastwood whole, and for a day or two we’d live in the belly of the cloud, unable to see more than five feet in front of us.

Toby drew out the story of Luke’s hour of shame, and I stared at the fog and listened to him laughing over how Luke had not only peed the bed, he’d peed the bed in another team’s hotel room. I laughed along once or twice, because I knew I was supposed to, but I was starting to get the feeling that Toby wasn’t telling me something.

“How bad is it?” I blurted.

Toby paused. We knew each other too well, and I knew that silence. It was a serious one.

“I talked to some people on the Barrows team today,” he said, trying to play it off.

“And?”

“Dude, are you sitting down?”

“Dude, tell me!” I pleaded.

“Christ, I’m trying!” Toby insisted. “Okay. Well, you know Cassidy’s brother?”

“Six years older? Big-shot debate champion? Went to Yale, then med school at Hopkins?” I filled in, wondering what Toby knew that I didn’t.

Toby sighed, his breath crackling through the phone.

“Cassidy’s brother is dead.”

“What?” I choked. Because whatever I’d been expecting Toby to say, it wasn’t that.

“He passed away last year,” Toby said. “That’s when Cassidy dropped out of school—and debate.”

I’d never heard Toby sound the way he did when he told me that. Not just sorry, but ashamed of himself, like he’d been too hard on Cassidy, misjudged her, misread her somehow in the worst possible way. That the big mystery of the legendary Cassidy Thorpe wasn’t the sort of story anyone would want to tell.

“How did he die?” I asked, breaking the silence.

“Some heart condition, apparently? It was really sudden. There was a whole article about it in his school newspaper. It’s—ah, hold on.”

There was some scuffling, and then Toby came back on.

“Sorry,” he said. “Listen, I have to get to the award ceremony, Ms. Weng is frog-marching me in as we speak. But I can still text—only kidding, Ms. Weng—”

“Go,” I said. “It’s fine. I’ll come over later.”

I hung up and stared down at my phone, at the little flashing time display of how long it had taken Toby to thoroughly wreck everything I thought I knew about Cassidy Thorpe. I saw now the way she’d talked about escaping the panopticon—what she’d really been doing was talking about everything besides the fact that her brother already had.